Crouse Named Silver Innovation Award Recipient

Crouse Hospital has received a Silver Innovation award from Avatar International, the company that manages the hospital’s patient satisfaction surveys. The firm tracks data from more than 500 hospitals and health organizations around the nation.

Each year, hospitals and health systems are invited by Avatar to submit innovative approaches they have implemented to improve the patient experience. The initiatives must be demonstrably effective, scalable and novel. An independent committee reviews all submissions and assigns a score to each. The top scorers receive honors at the gold, silver and bronze levels. This year, Crouse is one of four hospitals in the U.S. to earn the Silver Innovation designation.

Award recipients are selected based on a panel of independently scored criteria that includes degree of actual improvement, scope of change, degree of innovation, ability to spread idea externally and nature of barriers they had to overcome.

Crouse was recognized for its innovative approach related to organizational culture and how that impacts the patient experience. The hospital’s philosophy toward customer service – referred to as the “momma test” – forms the foundation for how the hospital views the patient experience. “Treating each patient the way we would want our own mothers to be treated is instilled at every level of the organization,” says Chief Quality Officer Derrick Suehs.

This is reinforced at Crouse through an internally developed program called GOLD (Growth Opportunities through Leadership Development), a two-week intensive leadership development program. As part of GOLD, all managers take part in Operation: Momma, a day-long experience where managers see the hospital through the eyes of a patient by actually serving as “patients” themselves. Participants, wearing hospital gowns, are taken to various departments via wheelchair and stretcher to see the environment the way a patient sees it.